Miss Understood

It’s becoming apparent that becoming Danielle’s featured practitioner was not, as I expected, an incredible opportunity to grow my business and deepen my intuition but instead (or rather as well as) an opportunity for me to have another meltdown. As I struggle with wanting success so badly, my cast-in-stone beliefs that it can never happen for me, are taking hold of me. Because I am different. I’m special. I was always told I was “special”, with a sneer. I’m difficult. I’m awkward. I am not like other children. As well as being bad and evil, I’m “misunderstood”, this, directed at me with distain and mockery, being the catch all for everything when I protest my innocence or defend my actions. Other children exist beyond this veil that blinds me, prevents me from see what “normal” looks like. A deep and dark twin has emerged, angry, frustrated, a victim of circumstance. Convinced that my prices, the timezone, my lack of abundance in my soul, will wither this plant to nothing.

I’m finding it hard to find my guides because I’m so in my head about it, and if I’m honest, I don’t want to listen. I’m angry with Julie’s guides because it’s all just more of the same. I know what I’m supposed to do. I know I have to look away. I know that the Universe can find me clients in my own timezone, and that there is plenty of money in the world and that all these excuses are just pinching off my abundance. You’re in your own way. You just need to let go. Surrender. Why can’t you see your brilliance, why can’t you see what we see? Peel back the layers. I just want to scream. No wonder people don’t believe this garbage! It’s like telling someone how to pronounce the words of a language they don’t understand. I know that I need to surrender. But what the fuck is surrender? You can find million opinions online, believe me, I’ve looked, but none of it is accessible to one who is not surrendered. All offered with the smugness of someone who has worked it out, with the benefit of a different vantage point. I get the concept. What frustrates me the most is that all the advice implies that you are somehow deliberately holding your self apart. Just more people making me feel like I’m deliberately doing it wrong. Like I know how to surrender. I know how to be happy. I know how to align with love and joy and peace but I’ve deliberately chosen not to.

Julie’s guides call her Dodgy Kate, with a slight element of criminal. I have called her Miss Understood. I know exactly who she is, and right now, she is driving the bus. She’s about 15. If I can’t surrender, after all I’ve done then it’s all over for me. I’m trapped here. Trapped in magnificent suffering, between the old world and the new. I know, believe with all my heart, woven through my soul, that the new world is the right way, the only way for me to find peace. I can no longer return to the old world where pushing and striving and suffering is to be admired, compared, polished up and held proudly as accomplishment. I would rather live in poverty, somewhere warm preferably, lying on dirty mat with a skinny, flea infested dog beside me, than venture back into the old world. I know that’s easy to say from my comfortable home, but if anyone is watching Shantatram on Apple TV, that book was a turning point for me. The love and joy and purpose that Lin finds in the slums of Bombay made so much sense to me and ignited a longing in my soul for more. But if I can’t make this new world work for me, where does that leave me? Worse off than before. That’s where. Having glimpsed the gardens of Eden so clearly, in breath-taking 4K beauty, only to be pushed back behind the curtain and told it’s not my time?

Jess Lively talks about waking up like a baby wakes up. When you look over at the younger souls (a patronising reference to how evolved we are, in terms of how many lifetimes we’ve lived) who are at the stage of power, pushing, striving and proving, they may look peaceful. They may sleep at night. So here I am, steeped in my potato shoe wisdom, fighting off demons every night. How can that be, Miss Understood rages? After all this work I’ve done, WHY AM I NOT HAPPY, and THESE people who tread on worms and pull nose-hair out of their wives as they sleep, are? Jess says if you look at a baby sleeping peacefully, and then watch it wake up, it begins by fidgeting, restlessly twitching, facial expressions contorting, grumbling and squeaking before they finally open their eyes and, hopefully, smile. There’s probably word for it, but Miss Understood can’t be bothered to engage with a dictionary because Miss Understood still harbours a deep mistrust and loathing towards babies. So we are at the grumbling stage. It’s all part of waking up.

Oh hurrah.

So much has happened since I started this blog that I’m pleased to say that Miss Understood and I came to an arrangement. There was a lot of emotional fall-out and a lot of inner child healing, and eventually a recognition that what is needed here is more self love. More compassion. Miss Understood rolls her eyes because she doesn’t believe in vulnerability. Miss Understood is very firmly rooted in the old world where if you had time to love yourself you weren’t working hard enough. And you would inevitably, be punished. Or mocked.

Miss Understood was still present, though slightly mollified, in Egypt. We went on holiday, for me the first holiday in 4 years, apart from a couple of week retreats (and we remember how restful the last emotional rollercoaster retreat was), but the first holiday abroad and with Gary. Somehow we ending up opting to learn to scuba dive, I should have realised that a course is not the most restful holiday but as somehow I overlooked that. This involved several weeks of online training learning of the technical stuff before you get there. I didn’t expect it to be hard, I don’t buy into this premise that learning is harder when you’re older, no you just have more choice how you spend your time so you go and do something more pleasurable, that’s all. And the one thing I am sure of, courtesy of Mum, is that I am very clever (I have removed the word “very” several times as that was her word, I wouldn’t use it, that’s just too congratulatory, but I’ll leave it in just to make me sweat). So I didn’t expect to struggle, but actually it was hard. And scary. If you come up too quickly your lungs will explode. Oh. That hadn’t occurred to me. The whole fear of being without air thing had been safely filed away with: “well we won’t be that far down”, confident that I could swim up to the surface, I mean, we’re not caving.

We got through the training and arrived in Egypt at a camp in the dessert on the Red Sea at 5am, having had no sleep. THAT I AM too old for, that’s for sure. We got a couple hours of sleep and the course started in the afternoon. It would have started after breakfast if the other girl on the course, a Swedish girl Freja, who had arrived with us, had more sense than us by sleeping through the morning. She was only 22 and ironically probably perfectly capable of staying up all night and running a marathon with a hangover.

It all went reasonably well, especially for our beautiful companion. Blonde, lithe, pretty and serene, I wanted to dislike her but I couldn’t: she was a joy to be around. But she did everything perfectly, first time, practically without instruction, calmly and gracefully. We weren’t bad, but I felt like a blundering rhino compared to her, but surprisingly, Miss Understood stayed quiet. Confident that Freja would have her downfall eventually. So not so much a spiritual acceptance as another limiting belief that sooner or later it would go to shit for her too.

As we learned more they obviously focus on what can go wrong and I was aware of a growing unease about the whole thing. What were we thinking? What was wrong with snorkelling? We’ve always been more than happy to snorkel, who in their right mind would deliberately put themselves in danger by going underwater “for a deeper look”? Surely it’s much the same down there, probably not even as beautiful as the light changes with depth. Then a panic about not really wanting to do it at all. Followed closely about a fear of letting Gary down. If I didn’t do this, where did that leave him? That was another source of unease, all this focus on being a “buddy”. Not only do you put yourself, consciously and willingly in a situation where you’re relying on equipment to enable you to breathe, but you’re also responsible for the life of your buddy, and you can’t take your eyes off them, not for a second, because if they run out of air it’s up to you to share yours. And in the even more horrific scenario that you run out of air, and they aren’t watching you like a hawk, you’re fucked. Doesn’t sound like fun, put like that, does it? Not a great place for someone who is already hypervigilant of the comfort of others.

I’m not a particularly dramatic person about safety, I didn’t think anyway. I’m quite stoic about death. I realise I may feel differently as the event occurs but I was brought up in a world that if you got into trouble in the water, you drowned. You didn’t expect anyone else to arrive on a white mermaid to save you. I’ve got in trouble in the swimming community who frown in disapproval – I only take my tow float because I’m obedient, not because I think I need it. I do realise I am hideously naive, but I have learned to respect the cold water and the tides. I quite like Reckless Kate though, we need more of her.

Day 3 I imploded. Not in a dramatic way, just voiced my concern that I wasn’t really sure I even wanted to do it. Gary didn’t seem overly concerned, maybe he knows me better than I give him credit for. I managed to find my guides – all my self-care goes out the window when my routine is disrupted so meditation and yoga just hadn’t happened. It’s hard to do these things when you’re sharing single room, and to be honest, I don’t have the discipline, and then once the routine is broken, all bets are off. As my guides helped me rifle though the emotions I realised that it wasn’t a fear of death that was behind it all, but the fear of getting it wrong. Of letting down the instructor, a young, handsome Egyptian named Mo who was funny and charming. Of not getting it right. Not getting it right? As if Mo gives a toss about a 50 something overweight white woman learning to dive on holidays who can’t get her CESA (controlled emergency swimming ascent) right. And as if I really give a shit about getting it wrong or looking stupid in front of Mo. Jeeeez. These cliches are embarrassing. Logically I don’t give a stuff, but these beliefs run deep, programmed into us, etched into channels. In my subconscious there is no logical examination of what may or may not happen if I get it wrong, just the fear. There is no perspective or rationalisation. Just the belief that I must always get it right, because in the past, getting it right kept me safe.

The fear doesn’t go away just because you identify it, but it’s easier to edge past it quietly and as long as you don’t poke sticks at it, you can co-exist with a wary eye on each other and as soon as we started swimming in the sea the fear went away. Or rather, became irrelevant in the eye-watering beauty of the Red Sea Reefs.

On my return I have realised that I need to step back and take care of Miss Understood. Properly. Disarm her. Fold her into the arms of love. I can see that I’m still pushing and striving despite all my attempts not to. Pushing for my guesthouse business. Pushing for my healing and intuitive business. Pushing to make money, be successful, pushing to be more spiritual, pushing to be be more healthy, pushing to be thinner, locked an endless cycle of abuse and contrition against myself. I have mastered so much in my journey but the self-love eludes me. I’m better at it, for sure, and I can recognise and help heal it in others, but there is still a huge void in me that I can’t ignore any longer. Until I address this I just move from one punishing schedule to another. I gave up a corporate job to be my own boss only to find that I’m a horrible boss. The fact that most of my work is unpaid, is irrelevant. I’m still on endless schedules and quests, for quality and environmental responsibility awards in the Shed, for more healing and intuitive techniques, courses and self-improvement, for exercise and diet regimes to whip my poor tired and wounded body into shape.

So it stops here.

I have committed to a exploration of self-love. I can’t put it off any more, and I don’t know where it will take me, but I know it has start here. I learned so much in October with all my new clients, and one of the biggest themes was about compassion for ourselves. How I long to hold Miss Understood in the same compassion that comes easily and readily for others. So with that in mind, as the holiday season approaches, hold yourself with compassion. At every turn.